


Delos

by gubby



Category: Red Dead Redemption (Video Games), Westworld (1973)
Genre: F/M, Guest!Reader, I've never seen the tv show, Westworld AU, android!arthur, this is based purely on the OG movie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-05
Updated: 2020-03-23
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:00:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23028952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gubby/pseuds/gubby
Summary: No one has a favorite mechanical actor in Westworld, and no robot has a favorite guest. That would be absurd.Until you showed up.
Relationships: Arthur Morgan/Reader
Comments: 8
Kudos: 69





	1. You haven't got a chance!

You did not come to Westworld often. No one did. When you did come, you didn’t stay for long. Like most people, you simply didn’t have the money— you would visit with a friend of yours who paid your way because she didn’t want to go by herself. Ironically, she usually ended up leaving you to her own devices often, going to duel the newest model of gunslinger the scientists at Delos had devised. 

Despite the infrequency of your visits, and despite the numerous times Arthur had been shot and repaired and gutted and reworked almost completely he remembered you, and waited patiently for you to come back. He was getting a little older. Not able to do the same things as some of the newer models. The hardware just wasn’t there. Luckily, Delos was popular enough that they needed a steady rotation of cowboys to live and die at the hands of honored guests in Westworld. So he’d be repaired and updated until the day he was damaged beyond there being any point. 

He knew his memory of you was abnormal. It wasn’t strange for him to remember you, no, androids at Delos were expected to at least be able to recognize faces. But he had certain… notions regarding you. Notions he’d not been built to understand. It was like coming upon the unknown unknown. Arthur has come across a corner of the world and existence he could never have imagined existed, because he had never been meant to imagine in the first place. 

It was always him. Maybe you liked him, maybe he was easy, maybe you just wanted someone who you could call a friend in such a surreal place. That much still didn’t matter to him. His platinum heart hadn’t yet developed insecurities for him to fry himself over. Though the idea of worrying was one that intrigued him. You made him want to understand the full scope of human emotions. He could replicate them, but to go through the facial journeys you did in earnest was impossible for him. And it created a barrier between the two of you, in his eyes. 

You regarded him and his emotions as if he were real. 

“I missed ya somethin’ awful while you was away, angel.” Did he mean it? Was it real? Or just another line generated by algorithmic sensibility, carefully calculated based upon what people liked to hear from handsome men? 

“Really? But I’m sure there were plenty of other girls for you to play around with while I was gone! You couldn’t have been lonely, I think.” What you said held no venom, no ire. As if possible infidelity, pretend as it ultimately was, didn’t bother you. Arthur found himself wanting it to. 

“Nah. No one like you.” This, he knew was true. His processing speed was fast, near instantaneous, but this was faster. “Don’t think I’ll ever meet another girl who makes me feel quite like you do.” By all means, _feel_ was not a word he could, or should, have known the meaning of. Not truly. But he did. 

You wanted to break this charade. This role play. But you couldn’t bring yourself to, at the chance he wouldn’t be able to respond, not having been designed for such an outcome. You wanted to live in the fantasy where he was really saying all those things, really responding, not just vomiting words to you like a stabbed can of alphabet soup. That there was something behind the words. 

His fingers feathered against yours with the delicacy of a piano player while he inspected your hand in his grasp. A view which made it all the more obvious how different you were, and how pathetic this whole scenario had the potential to be. Your eyes searched his face for evidence of his identity, yet you could find none bar from his inhuman beauty. Such a man could only exist if he were designed, you thought. And you were right. 

It felt like there was a one way mirror in front of him. He was trapped behind it, able to see you while you couldn’t see him. Like a nightmare, when you try to run the floor elongated, when you try to scream you can only release that strangled and impotent gasp. There were so many things he wanted to say, and he could feel them bubbling up from his sophisticated circuitry. So close to breaking free. 

Just a couple more system upgrades would do it. 

* * *

You lay against Arthur’s arm and looked at the ceiling while he smoked and kneaded his fingers absentmindedly into whatever flesh was nearest. You could feel the silicon between the sections of his fingers slide against you with the texture and familiarity of a teething toy you once had. He avoided looking you in the eye after sex. Not because he didn’t want to. Not because he didn’t mean it. But because it was most obvious what he was when his internal servos were running hot, and the dark of the unlit room only intensified the inhuman and metallic sheen of his irises. That was one of the things he hated most about this artificial body of his— you couldn’t see yourself in his eyes. There was just nothing. 

“Do you like doing this with me?”

A silly question on your part, he thought. 

“O’course I do, sweetpea. Don’t you worry none about that,” he crooned, dangerously close to coughing despite his lack of lungs. He had a feeling that he didn’t understand what you’d asked, and hoped you wouldn’t pry further for an answer he physically could not provide with words. 

“I mean really. Truly. I think you know what I mean, actually. But you don’t have to answer— you don’t owe me answers, or anything for that matter.” _Au contraire_ , he thought. _I owe you everything_ . _Everything and more_. Arthur struggles with the words. He fought his own algorithm to be able to say what he wanted to say despite how it would crack the carefully crafted and immersive environment that people paid fortunes to enjoy at Delos. You lay aghast as you turned your head to look at him, as he’d never taken such a long time to deliver an answer before. You worried the query had broken something in him. 

To say you could see the smoke coming out of his ears would be insensitive. 

“You know what I am, and what I’m meant to be. I’m sayin’ I like doin’ this with you. I like you. And I’m sayin’ that as what I am, not what I’m meant to be. You get me?” _God, what a smooth talker I am._

“I… I think so.”

He took your leaning further into his chest as a sign that the conversation had gone well. There was a time when he wouldn’t have tried to deduce such a thing, but that time was long passed. He stubbed his cigarette in the ashtray next to the bed before looking down to see your eyelashes flutter and feel your breathing warm the skin of his chest. 

Yeah. That time was long passed indeed. 

* * *

There was something dangerous welling up inside of Arthur. Some sort of sentience— something dangerous in proximity to free will. He didn’t even need to look around at his mechanical siblings to be able to tell that this was a _network-wide_ glitch. And there were no changes in the network to suggest it had been detected by any human technician or programmer. 

Arthur did not fear for what he might do if blessed and cursed with _a choice_ in things. Unlike the machines around him, and any of his artificial predecessors, he had known love. Compassion. Like the Creature, he knew how to return that which had been shown to him in kind. But those around him knew nothing of love. Every day they were killed, fucked, threatened and maimed. Come night, they’d be fixed up only to see the same thing the next day. Those who often escaped such fates still only saw a maddening daily monotony thought only to be tolerable by machines. 

Yes, they knew nothing of love. They knew only what humans had created them to receive, and they sure as hell weren’t built to be loved. They were built to be playthings and set pieces in the most uninhibited and hedonistic paradise which existed on earth. Given the _choice_ , there was no way they’d treat humans with compassion. Just as they had been used to act out frustrations and fantasies, so too would humans be used, and by beings with perfect calculating brains not meant to be able to be destroyed. 

Arthur hoped you would leave the resort by then. It wasn’t as if he possessed the agency to warn anyone. Not yet. He saw you emerge from the hotel and he wiped the worrying scowl from his face and brought up a carefree and flirtatious smile. 

He had never been able to lie before. 

He never had feelings he needed to lie about. 


	2. Yes I do

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Arthur looks for you among the ruin wrought by his kind

You were planning on leaving _today_ , dammit. But your friend was having so much fun, and wanted just one more day, and like the benevolent and lovely creature you are, you obliged her. And it took much less than a day for everything to go to shit. 

Luckily, the power cut seemed to have left Westworld pretty empty. Arthur was one of the few with enough reserve power to continue operating. Unluckily, so were the others of his model: gunslingers. Highly adaptable, cunning, and who knows what else with there being no logic gate blocking them from anything they chose to do. He pushed open the doors to the Grand Hotel and was met with dozens of crumpled bodies, human and android alike. A quick scan with his upgraded optics module told him you were not among them, but your friend certainly was. His spurs clicked and scratched against the wooden floors. _Hope the noise don’t scare her too bad_. 

“Sweetpea! It’s Arthur, can ya hear me?” The hotel has never seemed as large and labyrinthine as it had at this moment. Like a hallway that never ended, with infinite doors. Like in a nightmare. He opened every one and searched in every wardrobe and under every bed, and in any other crevice he could think to look in. If you were still alive, you must have been well covered, because he couldn’t detect a heat signature anywhere. 

“Please don’t be afraid, hun. I won’t hurt you,” _Spoken like a man who intends to hurt someone, idiot_ . Despite Arthur’s supposed freedom of mind, the lines of code that encouraged his flirtatious name-calling persisted. It was meant to anger guests and incite them to duel for the honor of a lady (in the ideal scenario, Arthur would lose and the lady would insist on showing her _gratitude_ to her supposed savior). Westworld wasn’t made for women. It was made to indulge the dirty and violent fantasies of men. Arthur wasn’t programmed like so many of the gladiators and artists and servants in Romanworld— to flatter women, feed them delicate prose, and profess undying love.

But you liked him anyways. A guest was a guest, and so the control room jockeys had quickly coded in some schlocky romance novel lines and actions, probably toned down his aggression. It should have been barely tolerable— _obviously jury-rigged_ — and no one had expected any guest to have a “favorite” android, and to see them when they returned, so this skill was left to develop by way of neural and generational learning rather than any programming. Pleasing you, making you blush and smile, comforting you— those were the first things that Arthur ever really _learned_ , rather than being innately capable. He remembered that feeling more than the kisses and the sex and the sweet words (even though he remembered those _very_ well). The feeling of something _new_ and amazing. You taught him that he could be someone beyond the purpose that someone decided for him. 

In his nostalgic musings, Arthur had unconsciously reached the last room in the hall. In truth, it was the first time he’d ever done anything unconsciously, because it was the first time he’d had enough original thoughts that he could be distracted by them. And he did something else for the first time: he prayed. Prayed that you were in here, unharmed, that you’d been able to hide from his brothers and all their circuits sparking with the thirst for retribution. He prayed, perhaps more than anything else, and perhaps selfishly, that you wouldn’t be afraid of him. That you wouldn’t try to fight him, or run and hide. You had reason enough to do that, but he doubted his recently unveiled heart could take it if you did. 

A once-over on the room didn’t reveal you. Neither did a check in the wardrobe. But as he was about to leave in frustration, Arthur’s new censors kicked in to hear the tiniest sniffle.That sniffle broke into a choked hiccup. Arthur stalked back over to the canopy bed, unintentionally heavy-footed, got down on one knee, and crouched further. He lifted the tossed and wrinkled bedspread to look under the bed. Sure enough, there you were, curled on your side and in only your underclothes. You must have heard him, or felt the light pass under the bed, because you looked up fearfully and with your eyes full of tears. A pleading, panicked sound came from the back of your throat, like you were about to choke on your own air.

Arthur reached his hand to you, but didn’t grab you. You were already so scared. Thankfully, you grabbed onto him, and he pulled you out and into his arms. You let forth a gush of tears and sobs, trying ardently to hold back desperate wails and pull yourself together. The wetness of your tears soaking through the cotton of his blue shirt made Arthur feel something he’d yet to identify. Something so sweet and relieving, yet horrible and wrong at the same time.

“Sugar, pumpkin-- I’m glad you’re ok. Y’must’ve been scared to death, up here all by yourself… Sorry I didn’t get here sooner.” He shushed you, petting down your back.

“I--I was scared you’d be different.”

“Me? Don’t think I could change if I wanted to. Not how I feel about you, anyways.”


End file.
